William Scott "Jack" Elam (November 13, 1920[1] – October 20, 2003) was an American film and television actor best known for his numerous roles as villains in Western films and, later in his career, comedies (sometimes spoofing his villainous image). His most distinguishing physical quality was his misaligned eye. Before his career in acting, he took several jobs in finance and served two years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Elam performed in 73 movies and in at least 41 television series.
Early life
Born in 1920 in Miami, Arizona—a small mining town located 85 miles east of Phoenix—Jack was one of two children of Millard Elam (1887-1965) and Alice Amelia, née Kerby (1884-1924)[2][3] Jack's father supported the family by working assorted jobs over the years, including stints as a carpenter, "millman", and accountant.[3][4][a] The Elams by 1924 had moved from Miami to the nearby community of Globe, Arizona, where in September that year Alice died at the age of 40, succumbing to what state medical records cite as a three-year struggle with "general paralysis".[5] After their mother's death, young Jack and his older sister Mildred went to live with various family members until Millard married again in April 1928 to Kansas native Flossie Varney.[6][7] Federal census records show that two years later the children, their father, stepmother, and Flossie's own mother were residing together in Globe, where Millard had a new job as an investigator for a loan company.[8] Flossie was employed as well at the time as a public school teacher, while Jack also contributed to the family's income by periodically working on nearby farms gleaning cotton.[8][9]
Eye injury
In 1931 Elam suffered a severe injury to his left eye during an altercation with another boy, an injury that ultimately blinded him in that eye and permanently damaged the muscles surrounding it.[10] As Jack grew older, the impaired muscles caused his eye increasingly to "drift" within its socket and not track in unison with his right eye, often giving him a cockeyed appearance. Percy Shain, a veteran film and television critic for The Boston Globe, interviewed Elam in 1974 and quoted the actor's comments about the injury:
I lost my eye when I was 11 in a fight at—would you believe it?—a boy scout meeting...It was a big initiation night but I got into a scrap with this other kid and he put a pencil through my eye.
There was no doctor there and it wasn't looked at until sometime afterward. They finally took out the lens and made it sightless. It was 20 years, though, before it started drifting. If it became an issue I could have it operated on, but at this stage of life I probably won't. There was a time, though, when I was making Rawhide, the movie [1951], that I mentioned to Darryl Zanuck [head of 20th Century-Fox] that I could have it fixed. He said, "Don't do it. It's part of your mystique." So I never got back to it and it's become my trademark, in a way.
At this stage, it only causes me minor inconvenience. Sometimes I'm a little off center, or when I'm talking to someone I do it at a slight angle.[11]
Zanuck's remarks about Elam's eye proved to be wise career advice, for despite any lifelong disadvantages that his "lazy eye" created for him personally, it proved to be an asset professionally, at least as a performer. His eye's distinctive appearance, combined with Elam's natural acting abilities, drew the attention of many casting directors of films and television series throughout the 1950s and 1960s.[11]
Education, military service and jobs prior to acting
Before becoming an actor, Elam completed his high-school education, got married, attended college, worked in a variety of jobs, and, despite being blind in one eye, served two years in the U.S. Navy during World War II.[9] He completed his secondary education in Arizona, graduating from Phoenix Union High School in the late 1930s and then moving to California, where he majored in "business studies" at Modesto[12] and Santa Monica junior colleges.[9][b] During that time, he was also employed in several positions before entering military service, including work as a salesman for a "house trailer agency",[13] as an accountant for the Standard Oil Company, a bookkeeper at the Bank of America, and a manager at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.[6][9][14] For a few years after his discharge from the navy, Elam continued to apply his business training as an accountant for Hopalong Cassidy Productions and as an independent auditor for Samuel Goldwyn and other moguls and companies associated with the film industry.[9][15] That work required Jack to spend long hours each day reading and examining in detail large quantities of financial records, a routine that put too much strain on his right eye, his "good eye".[16] "'I only see out of one eye'", he explained in an interview published in The Baltimore Sun in 1974, "'and that eye kept going shut.'" While Elam was widely recognized in Hollywood as "a leading independent auditor in motion pictures", by 1947 he found it necessary to quit that successful occupation entirely.[16] He added, "'I had [my right eye] operated on several times and finally the doctor said he couldn't open it any more. He told me I had to get out of the business immediately or go blind.'"[16]
Elam made his screen debut in 1949 in She Shoulda Said No!, an exploitation film in which a chorus girl's habitual marijuana smoking ruins her career and then drives her brother to suicide. Over the next decade as an actor, Elam continued to perform most often in gangster films and Westerns, firmly establishing himself in those genres as a reliable and memorable villain or "heavy". In fact, by the end of the 1950s various American news outlets and moviegoers were referring to him as "'the screen's most loathsome character'".[17]
Elam in 1963 received a rare opportunity to portray the good guy, appearing as a reformed gunfighter, Deputy U.S. Marshal J. D. Smith, in the ABC/Warner Bros. series The Dakotas, a Western intended as the successor of Cheyenne.[18]The Dakotas ran for 19 episodes.[18] He was then cast as George Taggart, "a former gunfighter who has become a U.S. marshal", in the 1963–1964 NBC/WB series Temple Houston.[19]
In 1969, he played another comedic role in Support Your Local Sheriff!, which was followed two years later by Support Your Local Gunfighter, both opposite James Garner. After his performances in those two films, Elam found his villainous parts dwindling and his comic roles increasing. (Both films were also directed by Burt Kennedy, who had seen Elam's potential as a comedian and directed him a total of 15 times in features and television.) Between those two films, he also played a comically cranky old coot opposite John Wayne in Howard Hawks's Rio Lobo (1970). In 1974–1975, he was cast as Zack Wheeler in The Texas Wheelers, a short-lived comedy series in which he portrayed a long-lost father returning home to raise his four children after their mother dies. Also on television, in 1979, he performed as Frankenstein's monster on the CBS sitcom Struck by Lightning, but the show was cancelled after only three episodes (the remaining eight were unaired (and remain so) in the U.S., though all 11 were aired in the UK in 1980).[23] He then appeared in the role of Hick Peterson in a first-season episode of Home Improvement alongside Ernest Borgnine (season one, episode 20, "Birds of a Feather Flock to Taylor").[24]
Elam portrayed Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing, a "crazed proctologist", in the 1981 action-comedy film The Cannonball Run; and three years later, he reprised the role for the production's sequel, Cannonball Run II.[25][26] Elam then played the character Charlie Hankins, a town drunk, in the 1986 "Weird Western" picture The Aurora Encounter.[27] During production, Elam developed what would become a lifelong relationship with an 11-year-old boy in Texas named Mickey Hays, who suffered from progeria. The 1987 documentary I Am Not a Freak portrays the close friendship between Elam and Hays. Elam, in what may be an apocryphal quote, said, "You know I've met a lot of people, but I've never met anybody that got next to me like Mickey."[28]
Elam was married twice, first to Jean Louise Hodgert from 1937 until her death from colon cancer on January 24, 1961.[31][c] Seven months later, in August 1961, Elam married again, then to Margaret M. Jennison.[32] The couple remained together for 42 years, until 2003, when Jack died of congestive heart failure at their home in Ashland, Oregon.[6][10]
^The spellings of Alice Kerby's first name and maiden name vary in both official and unofficial records. They are spelled "Alyce" and "Kirby" in some records, including on her 1918 marriage documents to Millard Elam and on her 1924 death certificate. The surname of her parents, however, is consistently spelled "Kerby" on the family's grave markers. See photographs of those markers at Find a Grave and refer to "Arizona, County Marriages, 1871-1964", license and certificate of Millard Elam and Alyce A. Kirby, September 28, 1918, Miami, Gila County, Arizona; original marriage documents preserved at Arizona Department of Libraries, Archives, and Public Records, Phoenix. Retrieved via FamilySearch, October 2, 2022.
^According to Jack Elam's entry in the 1940 federal census, by April that year he had attained the equivalent of "C-1" or one year of college education. See "Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 Population Schedule", household of Jack M. Elam and Jean L. Elam, Los Angeles City, Los Angeles County, California, April 29, 1940; digitized image of original census page, Enumeration District 14, 60-1131; NARA. Retrieved via FamilySearch, December 30, 2022.
^Although California marriage records document that Jack Millard Elam and Jean Louise Hodgert married in Los Angeles on April 20, 1944, the U.S. Census of 1940 documents that the couple that year were already living together in the city as husband and wife. See the 1940 census reference previously cited herein as well as the "California, County Marriages, 1850-1952" database, which includes a microfilm copy of a 1944 marriage certificate of Jack Millard Elam and Jean Louise Hodgert.
^Television Western Players 1960-1975: A Biographical Dictionary, Everett Aaker, McFarland Inc., 2017, p. 1926
^ ab"Arizona, Birth Certificates and Indexes, 1855-1930", William Scott Elam, Miami, Gilda County, Arizona, November 13, 1920, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Arizona State Board of Health, Phoenix. Microfilm image of original birth certificate signed by attending physician Cyril M. Crow, M.D.; retrieved online via FamilySearch archives, Salt Lake City, Utah, October 2, 2022.
^"Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920 Population Schedule", household of Millard Elam, Miami, Arizona, January 23–24, 1920; digitized image of original census page, ED [Enumeration District] 42, sheet 11B, line 85, family 257; National Archive Records Administration. Image of original census page retrieved via FamilySearch, December 11, 2022.
^"Arizona Deaths, 1870-1951", digital image of original death certificate of Alice Kirby Elam, September 7, 1924; Globe, Gila County, Arizona; Department of Library and Archives, Phoenix, Arizona. Image of original death certificate retrieved via FamilySearch, October 1, 2022.
^ abcMcCormick, Tiffany. "Jack Elam (1920-2003)", Oregon Encyclopedia, a project of Portland State University and The
Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon. Retrieved December 21, 2022.
^"Arizona, County Marriages, 1871-1964," Millard Elam and Flossie I. Varney, April 8, 1928; Maricopa, Pinal County, Arizona; microfilm copy (004251440) of original marriage license and certificate, Arizona Department of Libraries, Archives, and Public Records, Phoenix. Retrieved via FamilySearch, October 2, 2022.
^ ab"Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 Population Schedule", household of Millard Elam, Miami, Gila County, Arizona, April 8, 1930; digitized image of original census page, ED 42, sheet 11B, line 85, family 257; NARA. Retrieved via FamilySearch, October 2, 2022.
^ abcdeExshaw, John (2003). "Jack Elam: Veteran baddie, he acted in more than 50 films", obituary, The Guardian (London, UK), October 28, 2003, p. 25. Retrieved via ProQuest Historical Newspapers (Ann Arbor, Michigan) through subscription at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library, October 2, 2022.
^ abShain, Percy (1974). "Mean Jack Elam really isn't", The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts), September 22, 1974, p. B7. Retrieved via ProQuest, October 2, 2022.
^"Jack Elam". www.historicmodesto.com. Retrieved November 26, 2023.
^"Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 Population Schedule", household of Jack M. Elam, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, April 29, 1940; digitized image of original census page, Enumeration District 14, 60-1131; NARA. Retrieved via FamilySearch, December 30, 2022.
^"California, County Birth and Death Records, 1800-1994", database with images, microfilm copy of original death certificate of Jean Hodgert Elam, January 24, 1961; California Department of Health, Sacramento. Retrieved via FamilySearch archives.
^"California Marriage Index, 1960-1985", database with marriage certificate of Jack Elam and Margaret M. Jennison, Los Angeles, California, August 23, 1961; Center of Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento. Retrieved via FamilySearch archives, December 31, 2022.
